Flew's Flawed Science

Victor J. Stenger

For Free Inquiry

The late-in-life "conversion" of philosopher
Antony Flew from atheism to belief in God has been widely reported in the
media.[1]
In a recent interview with Gary Habermas, misleadingly entitled "My Pilgrimage
from Atheism to Theism," Flew explains his new position, which he
identifies as deism rather than theism.[2]
Richard Carrier has also carried on a correspondence with Flew, which clarifies
some of the issues.[3]

Flew has not changed his mind on
the inadequacy of the various philosophical arguments for God, which he very
ably covered in his classic work God and Philosophy.[4]
For example, he still does not buy into the moral argument, and remains
unimpressed by the kalČm cosmological
argument.[5]
However, he says he is impressed by recent claims that science has discovered
evidence for God, although he admits to Carrier that he has not kept up with
the scientific critiques of those arguments.[6]

Flew
does not completely reject the theistic revelation of scientific facts. As he
tells Habermas, " I am open to it, but not enthusiastic about potential
revelation from God. On the positive side, for example, I am very much
impressed with physicist Gerald Schroeder’s comments on Genesis 1. That this
biblical account might be scientifically accurate raises the possibility that
it is revelation."

Flew
has also warmed to contemporary design arguments: "I think that the most
impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent
scientific discoveries. However, I think the argument to Intelligent Design is
enormously stronger than it was when I first met it."

Is Genesis "Scientifically Accurate?"

In his 1998 book TheScience of God and other works,[7]Gerald Schroeder attempts to reconcile the
Bible with modern science. I will only address the particular claim that Flew
finds impressive, that our current cosmological understanding of the history of
the universe was revealed in Genesis.[8]

Schroeder asserts that the six
days of creation in the Bible really span 15.75 billion years "cosmic
time." This he regards as a successful biblical prophecy, since it is a
mere two billion years greater than the current best estimate of the age of the
universe.

Let us see how Schroeder extracts
this remarkable prophecy from Genesis. He obtains the cosmic time for creation
by multiplying the six days of biblical time by the redshift of light at a
moment in the early universe called "quark confinement." The redshift
tells us how much the frequency of a particular atomic spectral line decreases
because of the expansion of the universe. That frequency, Schroeder argues, is
the only proper clock for measuring cosmic time. At quark confinement, when
atomic nuclei first form, the redshift is about a factor of a trillion.

Actually, Schroeder assumes a
redshift factor of 9.5x1011. A more precise value, by current
estimates, is 4.4x1012, which would have the six biblical days of
creation last 72 billion years. So the biblical prophecy, by Schroeder's own
method of calculation, is over four times too high.

In any case, according to
Schroeder's choice of numbers, the first biblical day of creation is eight
billion cosmic years long. Each succeeding day is half as long as the previous
one in cosmic time so, by the magic of the exponential function, we arrive at
the time of Adam and Eve (plus or minus two billion years), at which moment
conventional human time takes over. The 6,000 or so years from then to now, in
human time, is insignificant on this scale, the last day of creation being 250
million cosmic years long.

As usual, prophecy is easy after
the fact. Clearly, Schroeder played around with the numbers until he found that
quark confinement gave him the roughly the answer he wanted—and even then he
used the wrong number. But, in any case, our universe did not begin at quark
confinement. It actually began about a millionth of a second earlier, at the
so-called Planck time. At this time, the
redshift was 1.6x1030. If Schroeder had used this redshift for his
calculation, the six days of creation would have lasted over 1028
cosmic years!

Schroeder claims he chose quark
confinement since, in day one of Genesis, "light is separated from
darkness." But there was no light at quark confinement. It took about
another 400,000 years for light to appear, when radiation finally
"decoupled" from matter. If Schroeder had used the redshift at
radiation decoupling for his calculation, the six days of creation would have
lasted only 6,000 years (not to be confused with the 6,000 years since Adam and
Eve).

When I first read The Science
of God I thought it was a clever spoof on
religious apologetics. Come on, Gerald, admit you are pulling Antony's leg!

In
fact, the creation story in Genesis looks nothing like big bang cosmology—no
matter how you spin it. In the Bible, the universe is a firmament and Earth is
fixed and immovable (not to mention, flat). In reality, the universe is
expanding and Earth rotates about the sun. In the Bible, Earth is created in
the first "day," before the sun, moon, and stars. In reality, Earth
did not form until nine billion years after the big bang, and after the sun and
many other stars.

Fine-Tuning and Intelligent Design

Next let me turn to the two other contemporary scientific
claims that Flew finds impressive—fine-tuning and intelligent design. These are
no more than modernized variations on the ancient argument from design, which
can be simply stated:

I cannot understand how the universe
and the enormous complexity of living things we see around us can have come
about naturally. Therefore, they must have been created supernaturally.

In 1802, William Paley could not understand how the human
eye, so fine-tuned for the collection of light and formation of images, could
have developed naturally. So, he concluded, it had to be designed by God. Now
we understand how eyes evolved several times by natural selection.

Today,
Antony Flew cannot understand how the universe, so fine-tuned for the
manufacture of the materials needed for living organisms, could have happened
naturally. So, he concludes, it most likely had to be designed by at least some
kind of minimal deity.

Apparently, Flew is unaware that
physicists and cosmologists are not as totally stumped by fine-tuning as he
seems to be. While slight changes in the constants of physics could make life as
we know it impossible, what about life as
we do not know it? We have no reason to
believe that our kind of carbon-based life is the only form that is possible,
under every possible variation in constants and laws of physics. I have shown
that long-lived stars, which are regarded as necessary for the building of the
chemical elements that constitute living structures, can be expected for a huge
range of physical constants.[9]
Similarly, Anthony Aguire examined the universes that result when six
cosmological parameters are varied by orders of magnitude and found that they
do not preclude the existence of intelligent life.[10]

Furthermore, modern cosmology
indicates that multiple universes may exist with different constants and laws
of physics. In that case, it is no more surprising that we live in the universe
suited for us than it is that we live on the planet suited for us—Earth rather
than Mars or Venus. The universe is not fine-tuned to life; life is fine-tuned
to the universe.

Theists argue that the multiple
universe hypothesis is nonparsimonious—a violation of Occam's razor. On the
contrary, multiple universes are implied by our best current knowledge. It
takes an additional hypothesis, not required by the data, to rule them out—thus
multiplying hypotheses beyond necessity. No one thinks the atomic model, which
multiplied the entities we deal with in physics by a factor of 1024,
violated Occam's razor.

However, I must emphasize that the
failure of the fine-tuning argument does not rest upon the existence of
multiple universes. It fails even for a single universe since some form of life
might have developed in whatever way that lonely universe happened to come
about. At least we do not currently have the knowledge to say otherwise.

Finally, Flew says, "the
argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first
met it." I am surprised that such a noted philosopher cannot see the fatal
flaws in the intelligent design argument, as exemplified by Michael Behe's
"irreducible complexity"[11]
and William Dembski's "design inference."[12]
They assert that a complex system can only arise out of something with high
intelligence. Although complexity is difficult to define, we can reasonably
expect a highly intelligent entity to be highly complex. Thus, it can only have
arisen out of something even more intelligent and complex, in infinite regress.
It's intelligent designers all the way down, not Aristotle's first cause as
Flew seems to think.

Fortunately, we can avoid an
infinite regress. We can just stop at the world. There is no reason why the
physical universe cannot be it's own first cause. As we know from both everyday
experience and sophisticated scientific observations, complex systems develop
from simpler systems all the time in nature—with not even low intelligence
required. A mist of water vapor can freeze into a snowflake. Winds can carve
out great cathedrals in rock. Brontosaurs can evolve from bacteria.

And, our relatively complex
universe could have arisen out of the entity that is simplest and most mindless
of all—the void.

Vic Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy
at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Colorado.

[6] Stenger,
Victor J., Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose
in the Unviverse (Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books, 2003).

[7]Schroeder, Gerald L. Genesis and the Big Bang, The
discovery of the harmony between modern science and the Bible (New York: Bantam Books, 1992);The
Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom (New York: Broadway Books, 1998); The Hidden Face of God, How
Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth (New
York: The Free Press, 2001).